


Come Slowly, Eden

by modsenga



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Asexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Asexual Crowley (Good Omens), Asexual Relationship, Broken Families, Crowley and God deal with their issues, Established Relationship, God is a troll but also a genius, Let's say it does, M/M, Mentor/Protégé, Other, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Canon, Queerplatonic Relationships, and Crowley road-races God on a motorcycle, and She really does care, does the entire dysfunctional dichotomy of heaven and hell count as a broken family, in which Aziraphale gets a new job, it's just all Very Complicated, lore headcanoneering, no beta we die like men, the Them go to college
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-06-25 03:45:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19737655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modsenga/pseuds/modsenga
Summary: Eight years after the Armageddon that Wasn't, God visits Soho with some game-changing news.





	1. You Found Me

She finds him in the succulent isle of Westminster’s newest gardening boutique, frowning at the label on a flowering _echeveria laui_ and muttering about the watering habits of a certain bookish Principality, and She proceeds to scare the hell out of him.

Figuratively speaking, of course. With Armageddon past (or not past, as the case may be), there isn’t much left of Hell to scare out of Crowley - not that he is, on a metaphysical level, exactly cognizant of this. These days, Crowley is mostly cognizant of three things: the alarming consistency of his Hell-free radio programming, the fierce relief of simply being alive, and the dusty emptiness of Aziraphale’s plantless windowsill. It’s been bothering him for years. Not the sort of issue that’s garnered much of his attention during the last several of those years, granted, when there were more pressing matters at hand, but an issue nonetheless. Any cozy old bookshop, he feels, ought to at least have one live thing peeking out the windows at passersby, to signal to them that there was something human-relevant and worthwhile inside*. Aziraphale has been adamant about his refusal of a cat, and so here Crowley is, slouched in front of a display of Mexican succulents, wondering if Aziraphale in all his glorious single-mindedness would remember to put an ice cube in the pot every two weeks or so. The last time he’d brought the angel a plant, he’d let it wilt within the month.

That’s the thing about living past the Armageddon that Wasn’t: in the vacuum of mental space left behind by the general anxiety of trying to survive the event, it occurs to one that there might be such things as _plans for the future,_ and that there is a certain amount of consideration to be paid to the fact that large parts of said future may occur in certain locations, and that given one’s newfound lack of urgency, the locations in which one intends to spend a great deal of their time might do with a bit of...well. _Sprucing._ The devil is, as they say, in the details.

At any rate, Crowley is alive, and Crowley has escaped the wrath of Hell, and now Crowley is looking for a plant. Actually, beyond his self-appointed duty to bring some life to Aziraphale’s dark and dusty bookshop, he is looking for several plants. What with his last planting spree having been over two decades ago, he feels he has earned a day to treat himself. He places the _echeveria_ in the shopping basket next to some young coleus starts and a bamboo shoot. He is not paying particular attention to the chatter of the shop assistant at his elbow, who is wearing a white T-shirt with _Anne’s Home and Gardening Delights_ printed on the front underneath a too-big denim jacket and who is giving him advice he already knows about the care and maintenance of succulents. He continues to not pay attention even as she leads him to the check-out stand and begins ringing up his purchases. He is more concerned with the _echeveria_ in its white plastic pot — the very last white one that had been left upon the shelf. The plant had struck him as a stubborn little bastard from the moment he’d spied it squatting among its brown-potted fellows, and he is busy trying to decide what sort of conversational approach would get him the best results with it. It isn’t technically for him, after all; a lighter touch than his usual method is therefore required. As well as Aziraphale has tolerated him over the years, he doubts the angel would be pleased to have him standing about the shop hollering de-motivational propaganda at his new potted friend.

“There you are, love,” says the shop assistant, handing the succulent back to Crowley. Her dark wrists are covered in tattoos of wild roses. “Go gentle on this little guy, now. He puts up a tough front, but he gets a bit anxious on watering day.”

 _Good,_ thinks Crowley, and immediately his brain follows up that thought with, _wait a minute._

He frowns at the sales associate. She is shorter than he is, but he still feels a sense of looking _up_ at her somehow, as though the body in front of him is only a diversion and her real face is hovering somewhere six feet above his head. She is dark, and wiry, and there is paint on her jeans and stray bits of curl escaping from beneath the floral mitpachat bound about her hair, and her eyes know him. He has approximately one sixteenth of a second to think about why that makes his spine go tense before She smiles.

How to describe the smile of God? How to describe the first Action ever taken in the universe, of which every subsequent event, conception, poem and song is but a pale imitation?

A curious fact about black holes is that they are entirely invisible to the eyes of mankind. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so powerful, and the material inside it so dense, that beyond its inevitable boundary not even a single particle of light can escape. This is of course impossible to simply _observe,_ so in order to get a proper sense of the thing, an ambitious team of scientists must focus their telescopes not at the thing itself, but upon the fractured and very visible cacophony of dying stars being pulled in and scattered around it. The same is true of God’s smile: the only logical way to comprehend it, at least in part, is to examine the effects such a phenomenon leaves behind. 

In Crowley’s case, the effects are that the potted succulent slips from his fingers and capsizes unceremoniously into the shopping basket, spilling dirt and bits of white plant fertilizer everywhere, and Crowley does not even notice. This is not because Crowley is typically the clumsy sort, or even because he is being dramatic,** but because he is in pain. Not the white-hot merciless pain expected of typical demonic exposure to holiness, which comes in a flash and departs just as quickly, often scouring the sight from the eyes of its victims. Rather, it is the pain of remembering what water tastes like after nearly dying of thirst and realizing, through contrast, the fraying dryness of one’s own ravaged throat. It is also the raw ache of a tortured body which, after years of having been shackled to a wall by the wrists, suddenly and without warning finds its bonds loosed and its atrophied muscles free.

This is the power of God’s smile upon the damned.

“Hi,” says the Lord God Almighty, the Most High, the Creator, the Absolution, Elohim, YHWH, the I AM, the Ancient of Days, the Father of Abraham, the Shepherd of Israel, and the Mother of the Heavenly Lights, with the smile still lingering upon Her face.

“Uhh,” says Crowley.

God reaches over the counter, picks up the overturned plant and sets it right. The spilled soil reappears back in the pot. On cue, Crowley’s pain disappears like string being cut from a puppet. It is as though a light has gone out inside the shell of his skin. He drags in a breath he doesn’t need. Then two more. They shudder their way down into his lungs, and he sways there, feeling hollow. 

“Take your time,” says God.

“Aziraphale,” he manages. His tongue feels foreign to him; the word barely makes it out alive.

“Aziraphale is in no danger,” She says. “Nor are you. I'm not here for retribution, love, don’t worry.”

The sound of Her voice speaking to him brings the slightest, softest noise out of his throat. He chokes it back and steps away from the counter, eyeing Her up and down. Her eyes are warm. Warm and dark, just like they were the last time he saw them. Artists always tended to paint the eyes of God as blinding white, or gold, or more recently even blue, but they were all wrong. There was, after all, a reason Crowley had left so much black space between the stars, back in the day.

Crowley looks around at the interior of Anne’s Home and Gardening Delights. Time, he sees, has halted in its footsteps. Droplets from a shop assistant’s watering can hang suspended above a potted snapdragon; behind him in the queue, a child sits in its mother’s arms with a pacifier clutched in hand, halfway to its mouth. These things do not hold Crowley’s attention for long. His gaze falls back into the gravitational field of God’s presence like a comet sucked into a star.

“Why?” he asks.

This time God’s smile, when it comes, carries traces of humor.

“Six thousand-plus years and you still greet me with questions,” She says. “That’s good. You’re going to have a lot of them in a minute. I came to let you know that things are about to get pretty busy in Heaven, and in Hell. I’ve got a Plan B.”

“...Plan B.”

“Yes. For the world.”

“For the world,” he echoes. Suddenly his peaceful Tuesday afternoon has set itself to reeling. He is clutching the handle of the shopping basket like it will keep him from falling face first into the check-out counter. 

The Word of God has a _Plan B?_

He opens his mouth to croak something out. It is only then he realizes he has been gaping at God like a fish. “Is this a—a new development then, or...?”

“No. It’s been in the works.”

“Right.” Crowley nods along, like a fool. The last time God had said She had something “in the works,” it had been at Heaven’s first ever all-staff meeting. She’d unveiled the complete concept for an entire living Universe. The production steps had already been outlined. There hadn’t been a single chorus of angels alive who hadn’t spent the next eon and a half collectively losing their shit over the whole thing.

“I can tell you more of the details, but not here,” God said, glancing around at the shop full of immobilized humans. “It’ll need some discussion. Sorry to drop in on you without warning. Take a day. Take a week. Think about it. When you’re ready to chat, leave your keys in the car overnight. I’ll come find you.”

“You took your time,” Crowley says, before he can think about the words coming out of his mouth, before the sands of linear time can start flowing inside the boutique again. Before God can disappear.

God’s eyes grow soft. They burn on his skin, but less like the tang of iron and more like the sting of a warm car on frozen ears. “I know,” She says.

Behind Crowley, the child drops its pacifier on the floor and starts to cry. The shop assistant sprays water over the snapdragons. The door opens to bring in another customer.

When he turns back, the check-out counter is empty.

———————

*Not that Crowley is by any means a connoisseur of bookshops, given the extremely limited range of them he’s ever cared to set foot into during his time on Earth (that range being a grand total of one), but that does not stop him from having Opinions. He is, if nothing else, a master of aesthetics.

**Though generally when offered the opportunity to do so, Crowley is never one to turn it down.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all - this chapter is a little different from the last one stylistically, as I’m still trying to decide what tone and balance I prefer between my own style and the sort of witty, whimsical canon style that we all love to pay tribute to. I may change back in future chapters, or it may fluctuate based on the characters or whatever feels right. Let me know in the comments what you think of the change, or any other thoughts/feels/Emotions/questions you might have along the way. Hope y’all enjoy!
> 
> This chapter contains a very small reference to an idea explored in Daegaer’s Captain Crowley series about Crowley’s actions immediately following the First World War (see the first footnote for this detail). If you haven’t read their amazing collection of Good Omens stories already, what are you doing with your life?? Go check them out!
> 
> Find Daegaer’s wonderful series here: https://archiveofourown.org/series/19366

“That was marvelous, my dear,” said Aziraphale, sliding the sword back into its sheath and rubbing at his bruised arm. “You’ve developed quite the aim. I daresay we’ll make a mighty hoplite of you yet!” 

Pepper did not smile. She never smiled, not when she practiced, or when she studied, or any time she felt there was crucial work to be done. But her eyes crackled with the pride of Aziraphale’s compliment, and she, too, sheathed her weapon. It was a training sword only, like his; they’d been circling in the alleyway behind his bookshop whacking merrily away at each other for the past hour.* As martial training went, Aziraphale reflected, he greatly preferred this sort to the sort he’d been subjected to in Heaven in the early days. Heaven’s drilling yard was wide and harsh and glaring, and Michael’s voice had carried much too loudly across the marble, and there was always an _audience_ \- hundreds of Heavenly eyes peering down from the celestial walls in judgement and in rapt attention, in preparation for the moment they would be called upon to take up the sword in their own turn. It might not have been so bad if God were there with them, but if She had ever come to watch the proceedings, Aziraphale hadn’t noticed. Michael’s radiance and the rhythmic clanging of a hundred angels’ blazing swords had always drowned everything else out. 

No, he decided as he opened the back door of the shop for Pepper to hop through, _this_ sort of training was far superior in every way. With this sort of training, you knew you were among friends, and there were usually iced biscuits to share at the end of it. Pepper led the way into the back room and leaned her sword against a wall, next to a shelf of restored Bibles and several cardboard boxes of Adam’s latest comic book edition that Aziraphale hadn’t stocked yet. Above her head, a tarnished _xiphos_ replica hung in a display case. Aziraphale brought the tin of biscuits from the front desk and offered one to her. 

“Thanks,” Pepper said, and wolfed her biscuit between long gulps of water. “When can I start taking it home with me? My sword, I mean. I could get more practice that way. I can run the drills on my own.” 

“I’m confident you can, my girl, but won’t your university object to hiding melee weapons in your dormitory?” 

“Not if they don’t know about it. Besides, Brian’s lab partner’s in the archery club and he’s got a bow in his dorm. With arrows. I don’t know why a wooden sword should be any different.” 

“And is this bow strictly _allowed?”_

Pepper paused, crunched a second biscuit, and shrugged. 

“I see. Well, I’m afraid if you’re looking to smuggle bone-breaking weapons onto campus, you’ll have to consult Mr. Crowley. And seeing that I should be very cross with him for sneaking _anything_ out of my shop, I doubt you will find much success on that front.” Aziraphale left the biscuit tin in Pepper’s care to heft a box of comic books in his arms, intending to lay them out neatly on the tiered stand by the front door which he had acquired for just that purpose. 

Pepper snorted and, snatching her book bag up from the corner where she’d left it, followed him out into the bookshop’s cramped and musty main room. “You know you don’t have to call him Mr. Crowley, right? Everyone else has been calling him Anthony since secondary. Well, except for Wensley, but that’s just Wensley for you.” 

“That is because Wensleydale is a meticulously-mannered young man and his parents taught him well,” Aziraphale informed Pepper. Pepper only laughed at him and dropped off the biscuit tin back at the front desk. 

“Really, though,” she said, folding her arms and fixing him with the same imperious look that she normally only paired with some derisive statement on the evils of global capitalism, “if I’m ever going to have to defend myself from creeps, a sword won’t do me much good sitting in the back of a bookshop halfway across town.” 

“If you ever must defend yourself, I expect running to be your first course of action,” Aziraphale told her sternly, placing the cardboard box gently on the floor and laying out Adam’s comics one by one on the book stand. “And screaming, I know you’re quite capable of that. You do still carry that stinging spray your mother gave you on the keychain, yes?” 

Pepper, used to this conversation, simply rolled her eyes at him. It was a dance they were familiar with by now. When Pepper had first asked him about swordcraft, she’d been eleven years old, a small bright spot on the wet tarmac of the Tadfield air base, wrapped in rain clothes the color of glowing embers and standing taller than her height should have allowed. As Adam Young and his friends had filed into his father’s car, she’d turned to Aziraphale, her wild hair frizzing in the rain, and she’d said, “do you _actually_ know how to use that? You don’t _look_ like someone who knows how to use a sword. No offense.” 

The heavenly blade had still been sparking in his hand. Aziraphale’s _yes_ had been stammering and reluctant, but the small girl had only tilted her head at him in thought. “Hmm,” she’d said, and then she had climbed into Arthur Young’s little round car and let herself be carried away. He’d all but forgotten the encounter until she marched up to his desk on her very first day at uni, years later, asking - perhaps _demanding_ was the better word - to be taught. 

Now, at nearly twenty, she stood in Aziraphale’s doorway with dusty cleats on her feet, deadly-sharp rings on her fingers and calluses on her hands, and Aziraphale thought, _my girl, you have never needed the sword._

Only as she was leaving the shop - when Aziraphale had returned to the comfort of his chair and his dusty old bookseller persona, and had transitioned from instructor to professional fusser and worrier - only then did Pepper smile. “Just trying to keep my options open,” she said, just as she had said for nearly every week since she’d begun coming for lessons over a year ago. With a wave, she turned to the front door and stepped out with a jingle into golden afternoon sunlight. “Thanks, Mr. Fell. See you later.” 

Aziraphale, past an armful of books, gave her a little wave through the window as her dark braids bobbed down the walkway and out of view. The moment she was gone, and the silence returned, he set down the comics and rocked back on his heels, staring at the half-filled shelf. 

_Just trying to keep my options open._ Aziraphale stood, flipped over the shop’s window sign to Closed, and padded back to the back room with a sigh.

The _xiphos_ was a short, unassuming thing propped up there in its case, and it was nearly black with age, but the tarnish fell away willingly under Aziraphale’s touch. The bronze shone soft in the light of the back room’s single-bulb lamp, but the Angel knew better than to be deceived. Heaven-forged bronze was a good deal stronger and deadlier than the man-made version, and boasted a cutting edge no mortal sword would have been able to maintain: one meant for slicing through reality as well as flesh, shearing through the immortal soul even as its flame scorched the material body. War had not treated it kindly in the millennia that followed Abel’s murder; the blade was pockmarked with scars, and the old leather grip was indented with the finger-shapes of someone with more slender, less forgiving fingers than his. Holding the blade in his hand, Aziraphale felt that old ugly feeling again which had ridden in the pit of his stomach for the duration of human history: shame, rearing up quick and nauseous into the back of his throat. Like a bottom-feeder rising to the surface of stagnant water at night, it appeared for a moment only to dive deep down again beyond his reach, evading his attempts to catch and manhandle it. It was a decidedly un-Angelic feeling to have, and yet despite his best efforts to shove it down over the years, he had never managed to make it completely go away. It came for him every time a new conflict broke out somewhere on the face of the planet, and it wrestled with him in his dreams every time a human’s blood was spilled on the ground by the hand of another. It was the main reason why Aziraphale generally preferred not to sleep. 

And yet, even after he had given the sword away a second time - given it over to the care of that kind and plain-spoken deliveryman at the bus stop outside the Tadfield library - it had returned to him. Days after the failed Armageddon, he’d found it in a taped cardboard box on the front stoop of his bookshop, slightly damp from the rain. He’d taken it in before any of his neighbors could see it, and so here it sat. Looking at it left a sour taste in his corporation’s mouth. 

But it was, nevertheless, a tool. One he was built for, whether he liked it or not. He hefted the blade and retreated up the narrow, rickety stairs at the back of the shop, up to the flat that lay squashed beneath the building’s roof, stale and left largely untouched since before the 1920s*. The flat was small and dark, and it held few books. But its empty back bedroom had always been just the right size for whatever the Angel needed it for. Today it was the size of a large warehouse, stretched to sprawling in every direction, and its ceiling towered high into darkness. 

Melee combat was different for Angels than it was for humans, and Aziraphale had had to devote a good portion of Pepper’s first year of training to simply figuring out how he ought to teach her. True, he had seen many wars scour the face of the Earth across history, but actually _fighting_ in them was something he’d only ever done but once**; when he had to go, he had usually gone as a healer, granting miracles to the hurt and solace to the dying. Adapting drills and techniques to a four-limbed, groundbound combatant had proved an interesting challenge for him. Of course, there were methods for defending oneself aground in case of incapacitated wings, but Aziraphale had never ended up needing them in the First War, and his training had since admittedly gone a bit rusty. That, he had vowed as Crowley drove them home from the Tadfield air base in his stolen Jeep, was a mistake he was not going to be making again. 

In the center of the empty room, Aziraphale settled into a ready stance, the tip of the sword out and raised. Fire rippled into existence along the blade with a soft noise like a gas stove being turned on. The first few swings were slow, tentative, more like letting go than striking out. Test swings, as though this were a new experiment Aziraphale had decided with some reservations to try out, as though he had not been quietly doing this routine by himself for nearly three thousand days now, wings flared and glowing in the dark recesses of a bedroom where he had long since taped the window over in black paper. He paced slow, almost stately, around an invisible opponent. The blade’s fire cast eerie undercut shadows upon his face. And then he danced. 

The difference was like Catatumbo lightning next to a spark from a house outlet. Gone was the kind, surprisingly spry tutor who rapped at Pepper’s undefended knuckles with wooden prop weapons and laughed in delight whenever she successfully jabbed him back. The Aziraphale who practiced in hidden solitude was terrifying. He moved faster than human eyesight could process and the swing of his blade left fiery arcs trailing in its wake. After-images of its glow hovered about him in knotted swirls: a firework turned deadly, a second divine halo of wrath. Wings splayed for balance, the Angel slashed and stabbed and parried, and vaulted into the stale air to slash again. He trailed a scatter of deadly blows up to the shadows of the rafters and back, and when he landed it shook the building. The force would have punched through the wooden floor and into the shop if that’s what he had wanted it to do. Instead, wreathed in shining radiance, he planted his feet on sound floorboards and swung his blade in a roundhouse arc that would have taken the heads off of three or four separate opposing Angels at once if they’d been standing there. 

A second flaming sword parried his blow, stopping it cold. 

Aziraphale was so startled he forgot his countermove. The force of the parry had jarred through his arm up to the shoulder. He held onto his sword only by the grace of supernatural strength. The blades seem locked together by magnetism; he could not draw away. God smiled at him over their crossed swords, Her dark skin shining in the luminous glow of his wings. 

“You kept it this time,” She noted, in the light tone of someone who is actually asking a question but is hoping the other person will provide explanation without them needing to. 

“God,” Aziraphale breathed, forgetting entirely the sword still in his hand until She mentioned it. “I-I—the sword? The sword! Yes, I—that, um, yes, well that is to say-I just, I thought, since, with the war and, and the end times just now passed and all—not that they really _ended,_ as it were, but of course You know that—I, well I thought, just in case, you know, ah…” 

His eyes were wide; his words stumbled. He had never possessed Crowley’s composure at speech, no matter how hard he tried to***. Light and heat filled his memory unbidden: warm stone at his back, sun-baked sand beneath his feet, a Voice, an empty-handedness, and his first taste of shame. His voice failed him; justification died on his tongue. Surely now he was come to the retribution for that first and terrible Lie. 

_“I must have put it down here somewhere…”_

God slid the tip of Her sword down the edge of his blade, pressing it easily aside. The fire snuffed obediently out as She stepped close to him. She put a hand up and rested it on his cheek, and all he saw was Her eyes. There was no anger there, no disappointment, no fire. He stared at Her, uncomprehending. 

“I never intended you for a life of fear, dear one,” She said, so very gently, and Aziraphale knew in the core of his Grace that She was speaking of far more than just his recent practice with the blade. 

Then She wrapped Her arms around him. Both swords dropped to the ground and vanished, and Aziraphale’s forehead pressed to Her shoulder. _I’m sorry,_ he cried from his heart, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…_

God rested Her chin on his shoulder and closed Her eyes. “I know, love,” was all She said. 

The Angel clutched his Creator more tightly. She squeezed him back - a small little squeeze. And just like that, six thousand years of hoarded guilt and shame were brushed softly away, and he wept openly, forgetting all else but that She was there, and smiling, and _warm._ And She was not angry. 

If there were holy tear stains on the collar of Her denim jacket after that cry, God never said anything.

———————

*though not entirely. Crowley’s then-bedroom was still the mess of rumpled bedding and tossed pillows that he had left it in, but Aziraphale had still taken the time to clean his uniform and hang it in the wardrobe, and he had miracled away the bloodstains out of the claw-footed bathtub in the privy across the hall.

**though King Arthur’s reign had, he felt, been a fair exception. As far as moral arguments went, Arthur’s was just about as watertight as a human’s could hope to get.

***this, of course, was an unfair estimation on Aziraphale’s part. While Crowley had mastered the art of the dramatic, well placed one-liner in the face of adversity, he was also quite prone to making a strange assortment of noises in place of traditional words as his default mode of expression. Crowley, meanwhile, was privately of the opinion that Aziraphale was the more eloquent speaker of the two of them, though this tended to be true only in casual cases, where the only thing at stake was Aziraphale’s pride due to Crowley’s occasional teasing.


End file.
